


In Red-Raw Covenant

by StopTalkingAtMe



Category: Elder Scrolls, The Shonni-etta Excerpts (Elder Scrolls Lore)
Genre: Brief depictions of harm to children, Canononical implied underage, Elder Scrolls: Cyrodiil is still a jungle, Elder Scrolls: Write me lore like you're in a darkened room with 15 shots of vodka, F/M, No One Here Has Ever Heard Of A Moral Compass Ever, Seriously so much semen, Sexual Content, The relationships are about as fucked-up as you'd expect given the source material, semen - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-03
Updated: 2020-03-03
Packaged: 2021-02-23 00:02:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23002513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/pseuds/StopTalkingAtMe
Summary: At first, Reman is as great and terrible as he ever was, the child ut Cyrod, the Light-of-Man, wearing the heart of a god upon his brow and walking once more upon the sacred land that birthed him. All is as it should be.Until she wakes in the night to find him missing.
Relationships: Shonni-Et/Reman Cyrodiil
Comments: 4
Kudos: 6
Collections: Writing Rainbow Red





	In Red-Raw Covenant

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kartaylir](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kartaylir/gifts).



Even by their standards, it is a strange journey.

West across the Rumare, and further still, into an inlet that threads through the labyrinthine swamps, they travel in slow, stately progress, drugged and dreaming beneath a draped canopy of moth-silk with its chiming song-chorus. A gift from a moth-tongued suitor who eyed the God-Crown’s boyish, slender form with lecherous not-quite-human eyes as he wove a tale of a world-made-one. A gift beyond price.

It attracts moths in such numbers that the soft whirring of their wings stirs the draping silks, so that a fine film of dust descends. It catches the light of the setting sun and makes the air seem to burn like bale-fire. A moth as large as her palm clings to Shonni-Et's hip, its feathery antennae brushing against her as it tastes the dust on her skin.

The musicians play on, discordant no matter how softly they play. Mouth-harps and sackpipes, the Ashlandi music of her childhood – a rare act of tenderness on Reman’s part. The music precedes them, and is echoed back in the cries from the animals and birds hidden in the thick tangles of foliage overhead.

Drunk on pleasure and dust and rice-wine, Reman sprawls across the cushions between her and Sed-Yenna. He is naked except for the crown of feathers, his skin gleaming with bronze paint, sticky with sweat and blood and seed. He’s left marks on her skin; some – the bruises – are already fading, but the streaks of paint remain, marking her as his. And more: she still carries his seed inside her and upon her skin, glistening in an arc above her breasts. In the humidity, it will not dry. Another matching splatter along Sed-Yenna’s thigh, smearing the intricate patterns of henna traced upon her skin.

They’ll need to rise soon, to perform their ablutions, to scrape his spendings from their skin before they cleanse themselves, but for the moment it can wait.

She rises from the cushioned bed, gently dislodging the moth and untangling herself from Reman’s embrace. 

The world is burning and only she can see. 

Even as far as they have come, it still seems that they remain in the shadow of the White-Gold Tower. From here she cannot see the settlement growing up around the Tower, so it appears to stand alone, ancient and unending, and yet for an instant against the broken-open sky, she sees it sundered, jagged as a broken tooth.

She can taste ash on her tongue, like spice, like dreaming. When she looks back at the bed of cushions, she sees her God-Crowned Beloved differently, his unbroken, unscarred skin scaled and copper-gleaming. She sees him as a dragon lying upon a bed of serpents, jewel-bright and venomous, scarlet and emerald and black as ebony.

They writhe around him, twine up his arms, and through his hair, pierce his scaled skin with their fangs, tongues flickering as they taste the savour of his sweat upon the air. One coils around his throat, its sharp-pointed face turning her way as it tightens its grip. What frightens her most is that even the faint reddish light of the Chim-el Adabal is dying. The stone, so long lost to them, is cracked and dimming, and she knows then with certainty that it will be lost again, that this, whatever it is that they are building here, will not, _cannot_ , last forever.

She thinks of an offering to her ancestors made long ago, an egg cracked open into a carved wooden bowl, and inside the red and clotted yolk. An omen, but of what she cannot say.

Her hands grip the side of the barge tight as a breeze stirs her hair. It chases away a little of the moth-dust that clogs her throat and vision, enough that she can feel the breeze cool against her sweat-dampened skin. Sweat pools in the small of her back. The moths whir around her, and in the song of their wings she seems again to hear the whispers of the moth-priest, with his visions of their world-made-one, who first named her Beloved as God-Emperor while Reman listened, dark-eyed. Unreadable. The first time she ever feared him, and she has known him since he was an infant.

It might have been Sed-Yenna who found him, but it was Shonni-Et who dreamed of his birth, who heard the cries of her ancestors echoing back across the Sleeve, the cries of the countless slaughtered and enslaved crying out for their champion. Al-Esh herself appeared to her in a blaze of dragonfire, her chest gaping open, a dreadful cavity where her heart had been torn out, and that heart she carried upon her hands, holding it forth like an offering, glistening jewel-bright and divine, spilling rubies through her fingers as she whispered to Shonni-Et of the birth of the child ut Cyrod. Of Reman.

She has seen him painted with the blood of men. She has killed for him too: the arts of love and butchery have proved not so very different after all, and she has come to learn that there is beauty to be found in slaughter. She has seen men ejaculate at their ends, heard the desire in their last choking breaths, and seen Reman drink in their death like the sweetest wine, his eyes bright and hungry. 

She knows what he does, but what she does not know is _why_. What drives him to unite the tribes of Colovia, to knit their sundered land back together? Does he hear her, his nameless mother, as Shonni-Et once did? Does she call to him in the crackling of the brazier fires, or warm his skin with her breath when he lays his head down to sleep? Or is it the moth-priest’s voice he hears, with the warp and weft of truth and lies so closely woven the two can never be untangled?

* * *

When they reach the outer edges of the swampland and can no longer use the barge they transfer to a palanquin borne by a team of minotaurs, their muscular bulks sweating and straining, tails lashing at stinging flies. The curtains of silken gauze do little to keep out the swarms, and they amuse themselves by crushing the blood-fatted insects between their teeth so that they burst like grapes.

At night, the jungle is alight. A wisp-light shines through the mangroves, accompanied by the call of a half-forgotten voice from her childhood, urging her to ‘ _come-come the rice is ready’_. The light of a Well streams up towards the sky, and as they pass by, the power makes her blood sing out, her sweat-dampened skin prickle with outraged fury that the Ayleids could build such wonders.

A long journey, longer still when they take a detour on the word of a warband led by a Colovian. He has already sworn his fealty to the Throne of White-Gold, although when he tells them of the elves, his eyes are hard. Ayleids, he tells them, who have stayed hidden all this time, evading even the Marukhati Selective in the dense jungle.

Stories, she wants to say, but she knows there is no escaping this.

Whatever his reasons for sending them out here, that hard-eyed Colovian, he wasn’t lying. They find what is left of the Ayleid city, where their people were once herded like cattle, and then they find the elves too, far to the west, so far Shonni-Et is beginning to hope they’ll turn back. And they are not the dangerous enemy the Colovian spoke of, but a dwindling community of women and children and males too old or sick to fight, begging for mercy in broken Nedic.

There is no mercy to be found.

What is left of them when Reman is done resembles their flesh-workings of old, no longer recognisable as man or mer.

Afterwards he does not speak. For a long time he kneels with his back to his wives and their procession, fragments of bone glistening in hair clotted with gore. She combs splinters from his hair as he sits stony-faced, once more with the bronzed God-Aspect donned like a mask. And when she is done, he fucks her with the elf-blood slick on his skin, forcing her mouth to the curve of his shoulder, so she can do naught else but sink her teeth into his flesh. And because it seems to be his wish, she worries at the meat of him until his blood springs forth and it’s not sweet, but dark and rich, and as it floods her mouth she’s coming, the pleasure rising unstoppable as a storm-tide.

He ruts to his finish, a cry torn from him as he comes, fast and hard, and in the aftermath, she feels his panting breath on her shoulder. She sets her hand between his shoulder-blades, feels the feverish heat to his skin, and still he makes no move to roll away from her. At first she thinks he means to take her again, to will his body back into readiness, but he’s already softening inside her, and she both wishes she could, and is grateful that she cannot, see his face.

* * *

Sancre Tor rises out of the thick tangles of dense jungle. There has long been a settlement here, and it has been kept fortified since the days of the Uprising, but now the wooden palisades are rotting through and the stone fort is crumbling in the humidity. Still they are welcomed with all due ceremony and pomp while Reman stands framed against the scarlet-burning sky, draped in cloth-of-gold and shining ancestor-silks, his hair woven through with feathers in mockery of the Unfeathered.

And for a little while at least, he is as great and terrible as he ever was, the child ut Cyrod, the Light-of-Man, wearing the heart of a god upon his brow and walking once more upon the sacred land that birthed him. All is as it should be.

Until she wakes in the night to find him missing.

The settlement is quiet, the braziers extinguished, and she finds him, sitting on an outcrop, framed against the swollen face of Segunda. When he turns his face her way, she hesitates. The feathers have all been stripped away in their lovemaking and with his hair hanging loose, the stone set in his forehead appears for a moment like a bloody wound. She’d leave him like that if she could, but he calls to her before she can slip away, calls to her and asks her whether she truly believes Al-Esh is buried here.

His voice is strange.

Just a boy, she thinks, yet how much blood is on his hands, and how much more will there be if her dreamings are true.

And she tells him the truth, which is that she does not know.

He asks her about her mother, and this too is a question she cannot answer. She was chosen too young, taken from her parents who were rice-farmers in the Nibenay Basin, but of them she remembers nothing: not their names, nor whether they wailed in despair or whether they considered it a cause for celebration, even if all that celebration was because of one less mouth to fill with rice.

So instead she tells him what she does remember: a skirt gathered up and bunched above legs wading thigh-deep in water; the by-moonlight gathering of slaughterfish-spawn; a sticky hot-fisted hand of a toddler’s in hers; the inscribed skull-working of her grandmother, encased in plaster and kept above the stove; the wine poured away to the ancestors, and a child’s voice – her voice, perhaps, or one of her siblings – crying, ‘More, Da, more.’

Memories she does not know she remembered until she begins to speak return in a flood, until her throat hurts and her chest aches and she is crying, for her lost life, and for his, and still the memories keep coming until her heart is a solid aching knot. His arm presses warn against hers, and when her voice fails and she can force no more memories through a throat swollen closed with grief, he speaks, his voice as quiet and sad as her own.

I don’t know what I am, he tells her.

She closes her eyes.

She remembers the moment her sister-lover came barefooted down the sacred hill, leaving bloodied footsteps in her wake and the child clasped close. She was laughing, she was crying, and her fingers – once she was close enough for Shonni-Et to see – were encrusted in dirt and blood. A gift from the earth, she said, a gift from Al-Esh, and all the while the baby screamed.

Shonni-Et had never heard such rage. His forehead was streaked with blood, like a blow, like a wound, the ruby burning with the skin all red around it and the glistening white gleam of bone. A newborn scrap that could not so much as hold up its head, but she saw the baby’s eyes and they were ancient. No newborn should be able to focus its eyes like that, but he could: he saw her and he marked her and from then on she was his.

That was the first and the last time he cried. He never cried once, after he was brought down from Sancre Tor, and nor did he sicken. He laughed, though, a bright-eyed child, his hands reaching for hers as he took his first stumbling steps, and those were the moments she treasured, the moments in between, when she saw the boy he might have been if they’d both been free.

He is the land-made-flesh, but the land still carries the memory of the cruelties inflicted here. Is it wrong, she wonders, to take a child and fashion him into a monster? Even if a monster is what the land needs?

And because she loves him, can do nothing else but love him, she who is his wife and mother and nurse and handmaiden and lover and servant and champion and all things, she cups his cheeks and whispers to him all the things she has seen and heard. She tells him of snakes and slaughter, and she brushes his hair back from his cheeks, and finds with the pads of her fingers the stone embedded in his forehead, and through it she feels the pulse of his heart. He brings the fingers of her other hand to his mouth to kiss them, and then it’s her lips he’s kissing with a clumsiness born of no practised art, but of something older and far sweeter.

With his tongue he brings her to a wordless gasping climax. She’s still wet with his seed from their earlier lovemaking, and when he kisses her afterwards she can taste it on his lips. The kiss is fierce and clumsy, and because of that – because there is no art to it – she tangles her fingers in his hair and kisses him back.

And what else can she do, but swallow it down, no matter that it’s forbidden? Because she loves him, and will always love him, and can do naught else but love him, and in the taste of his seed is there divined the approach of his death, and of hers, and of their final journey’s end.


End file.
